Typically, pricing information isn’t that hard to come by. Yet when I asked an Oracle PR rep about the Exadata pricing structure last month, instead of a simple number I was directed to a video of Larry Ellison’s keynote address (28:20 specifically), where Ellison cited the price as $650,000 for the machine and $1,680,000 for the software license.

Of course, Oracle pricing is seldom a simple affair — or any enterprise technology pricing for that matter.

In fact, a number of bloggers have expressed some confusion over the new Oracle pricing, despite how simple it may look on Oracle’s Exadata price list. Curt Monash posted his own Exadata pricing spreadsheet on his blog and estimates the list price at $5,546,000 and per-terabyte prices of $60,000 and $198,000 for the two configurations offered. Monash notes that that is still an incomplete picture because questions remain over what software needs to be purchased on the server side and how much data fits into an Exadata cell anyway.

Whatever the final number, it’s a pretty steep price, no matter how big the powerful the appliance — especially in this economy.

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"[...text deleted...] because questions remain over what software needs to be purchased on the server side and how much data fits into an Exadata cell anyway."
There cannot be any confusion over how much data fits in an Oracle Exadata Storage Cell. There are a fixed number of 12 disks and they are either 300GB SAS or 1000GB SATA. After performing the math for gross capacity, the deployment needs will reduce the value down based on specifics of the deployment such as mirroring (2-way, 3-way) and what percentage of the disk geometry to use for application data. A good rule of thumb is 60% of 2-way mirrored net capacity, or 1TB for the SAS option and 3.6TB for the SATA option. Certain applications will do just fine placing data over a greater percentage of the disks so the 1TB and 3.6TB values can adjust upward.
In the end, all of the disk capacity is usable. Varying from the rule-of-thumb 60% is application specific.

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